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How it Ends

I’m old enough to remember when The Atlantic Monthly was a serious magazine. That was before James Fallows took it over, and drove it into a ditch. It has since progressed to Atlantic Trench depths of comprehensive intellectualruin. Some gratitude is in order for the clarity with which it exposes our destination, guided by the supreme Leftist Law: Any cultural institution that is not dominated by the oppressed talking about their oppression is oppressive.

As Professor Zaius explains in the comment section of the vibrant debate article:

… the judges, while they are experienced debaters and coaches themselves, don’t by and large subscribe to the notion that the “best argument” in conventional terms should win. Many, if not most, see debate as a means for advancing social justice and dismantling oppressive hierarchies of whiteness and patriarchy. Inasmuch as “logic” upholds these hierarchies and personal experiences from POC and non-linear storytelling and music fight them, then “logic” should lose.

We’re so screwed.

ADDED: “… while one has some sympathy for Hardy and the other traditional debate do-gooders, they seem to be pining for a format, and a world, that has already passed. Have a look at Twitter. Or MSNBC. Or the New York Times. Or Attorney General Eric Holder. Or any of the rest of the grievance-mongering chattering class for whom the unbeatable trump card these days is discerning ‘racism’ in their opponents. Debate isn’t what it used to be. The college kids might as well learn this brute fact sooner rather than later.”

These organizations apparently had already discarded any semblance of actual debate for some time in favor of….something else. Armed with this knowledge, incidentally, you can note that the original article plays on the reader’s expectation of what “debate” looks like in order to enhance the perception of colorful Sun People shaking up stody Anglo parliamentary debates rather than a clearly dysfunctional system falling further into dysfunction. Assuming that the author ever actually watched any of these “debates”.

One is only screwed if one accepts the screw. It is better to be the screw than the hole, and so on.

Academic reform on the tried, trued and hallowed as man’s first and most powerful method discussed is of course of the same necessity as Cortes burning the Meshica [Aztec] Temples and dismissing their bloodstained, filthy priests of sacrifice. When something bad towards someone and something you hate has to happen for your very survival it means the gods smile on your venture.

Not screwed. It’s screwed if you want to save the academic system. The system that certain quarters want to preserve even if it means insane evil tyranny is perpetuated. For one cannot ignore the question of interest. Too bad. For preserving the priesthood has cost us quite enough. Preserving the priesthood has made debt slaves of a generation, this is why they vote Left.

For whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

The madness you quote here. They can’t be saved and shouldn’t be. Everyone wants them gone, especially they themselves. This is a sick animal moving to the edge of the herd. Let us be merciful to ourselves and even to them and end it.

This Atlantic piece could be the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever read. At least now it’s out in the open. It’s a war on all rationality. Nobody can deny it. That’s actually kind of refreshing. Any right-thinking person will be against this form of “debate.”

This story brings to mind Leonard Peikoff”s recent book, “The DIM Hypothesis: Why the lights in the west are going out.” Peikoff argues that fundamentalist Christianity is gonna come roaring back into political power precisely because it’s the only system that offers an integrated Telos for the average man — and because the progressive vision is so obviously horrific and getting worse. He calls Christianity a form of mis-integration: a single unifying truth propounded independent of any corroborating data. Progressivism, meanwhile, consists of multiple assertions propounded independent of any corroborating data. As the latter implodes, the former will move in to replace it.

So in Peikoff’s model US politics will be a slugfest between progressives and fundamentalists (with the oligarchs laughing all the way to the bank — and the Confucian (Aristotelian?) Chinese cleaning up geopolitically) …

… Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.

[…]

Ryan Walsh and Elijah Smith, employed a similar style and became the first African-Americans to win two national debate tournaments. Many of their arguments, based on personal memoir and rap music, completely ignored the stated resolution, and instead asserted that the framework of collegiate debate has historically privileged straight, white, middle-class students.

Personal memoir: I remember writing an essay in school once on a Dickens extract. It was a very old exam question. We were asked to explore the devices Dickens employed to convey humour (or something to that effect). I can’t remember the passage (maybe about a ship journey?), but it certainly wasn’t funny. So the vast majority of us – rather than explore devices of any sort – wrote reductionist diatribes about the stupidity of the question. And when we got crap marks we denounced and debated with the teacher (in a nutshell: ‘but… but, it’s simply not funny!’)

So obviously this was all pre-mediated on the teacher’s part (exams were drawing near…) – his point being that we weren’t required to give our verdict on Dickens’ hilarity or being rewarded for doing so, but to answer the question – ‘how’ does Dickens convey humour? Everything else is erroneous and sh/would be treated as such.

Funny how the debate article, out of all the frothy linked goodness, sets the commentariat off, to the exclusion of all the other feminist/homo/ethno blatherings. I, too, found myself actually. unconsciously clenching my fists about halfway through.

It should have come with a “trigger warning.”

There’s a good reason for this–the awarding of prizes to folk who yell things like “Fuck the time!” during a “formal” debate is a sword through the heart of the weltanschauung of the typical Outside in reader, indeed.

The value of this post and the link is to shatter the last, faint hope, to boot-stomp the face of us poor hopeful saps who may still have believed some alternative to Exit was possible.

“Screwed,” not in the sense of giving up, but of knowing one level deeper that the ship really is sinking, in fact the water is already over the gunwales. There is no hope, no fix.

Burning down a university on the way to the lifeboats is a very human and healthy reaction.

On the one hand, members of minority victim groups are bad at rational debate, and that’s racist. On the other hand, to suggest that members of minority victims groups are bad at rational debate is also racist. In conclusion, then: baa.

The debate society piece hardly seems like it should be held against the Atlantic. It looks carefully designed for exactly the purpose it’s being used for here – making sensible people as angry as possible at the stupidity of parts of the social justice movement.